Evaluation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Performance

 

My first thoughts upon the completion of the show was that it went amazingly well. Every single night we had a brilliant audience that was very responsive and made it easier to play upon. On the first night in Cast One, I was playing an ‘Oompa Loompa’, this was a fun role. I had never been on stage with a wig or this much makeup on. I’m usually quite a confident person and I didn’t know how I would feel to look so different, but I didn’t mind it at all. It was excellent to be an ‘Oompa Loompa’ and play such a weird and strange character. All of my other roles haven’t been as fantastical. The truly fun part of the role was interacting with the other ‘Oompa Loompas’ as a group who knew dangerous things were going to happen and finding all of it funny was like being part of a big conspiracy.

I believe my main performance as ‘Mr Salt’ went very well. Throughout my preparation for the character, I had struggled to become an upper-class businessman. I struggled to find the right mindset and produce the right accent. I wanted to get this role right and throughout the rehearsal stages felt that there was a lot to be desired in my performance. Upon looking back at my show nights, I thought I had fixed these deficiencies and was quite proud of myself. I did this through greater practice at home and at college. Everything came together and like I often find, as soon as I was on stage, I was more confident and able to just let go and become ‘Mr Salt’. I often find this to be the case, as during rehearsals I overthink what I’m doing, and this comes across. But when I’m performing on stage all of that falls away and I’m able to give the role my all.

I thought my accent came together and the further the course has gone on the more confident I feel. The group is able to work as a team and the play wouldn’t work if we were not able to play and react off one another. You can feel the difference from the beginning of the course year to now. We all came together to create an amazing piece and that’s all any of us could really ask for.

There was a couple of hiccups during show nights, and I can’t avoid talking about them. A couple of set issues, where props kept falling over or down. As well as during the final performance the fire alarm went off. Even with these issues, I don’t feel they detracted from the performance. What really matters is how we react to the things that went wrong during the performance, and I believe we showed a lot of professionalism. When things fell over, we were able to continue and act like that was mean to happen and when the fire alarm went off, we didn’t panic. We all left stage in character and managed to get the audience out safely and calmly. When we did manage to get back on stage, we were better than ever. Working in that large of an ensemble brought everyone in our casts closer together. What truly made this performance phenomenal was our ensemble working together to make a fantastic piece of theatre.